Short review: two thumbs up. Superb. Definitive. Well written and engaging. Innovative and even ground-breaking. Connects the dots between the different aspects and dimensions of empathy. Sets a new standard in empathy studies. The longer – much longer – review follows. Note also that since this is not a softball review, several criticisms, incompletenesses, and limitations are called out.

Susan Lanzoni’s comprehensive history of the concept of empathy – the concept, not the mere word – breaks new ground in our understanding of the distinction. She

Cover art: Empathy: A History by Susan Lanzoni – showing the full spectrum of aspects of empathy from projection to receptivity in interpersonal relations

explores empathy’s significance for diverse aspects of our humanity, extending from art and advertising to race relations and talk therapy: Empathy: A History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 392 pp., $30 (US).

Just to be clear: Lanzoni’s is not a “how to” or self-help book; which does not mean that one cannot expand one’s empathy by engaging with empathy’s deep structure in this multi-dimensional, historical encounter. One can. However, the reader will not find explicit tips and techniques in applying empathy.

Lanzoni engages with empathy and: (1) natural beauty and art (2) the 19th century psychological laboratories of Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), Edward Bradford Titchener (1867–1927), and their rivals (3) theatre and modern dance (4) mental illness such as psychosis and schizophrenia (5) social work and psychotherapy (6) measurement using psychometric questionnaires (7) popular culture including advertising and the media (8) race relations (9) neuroscience.

Lanzoni begins by quoting the work of Ted Cohen (1939–2014) on metaphor in Thinking of Others: On the Talent for Metaphor(2009). Formulating a metaphor and imagining oneself in another person’s position point to a common twofold root, an art [Kunst] hidden in the depths of the human soul, whose true operations we can divine from nature and lay unveiled before our eyes only with difficulty, but whose depths we are unlikely to be able ever adequately to plumb. Lanzoni’s implies the art in question is precisely empathy and the translation it makes possible. Thus, we always honor the late Ted Cohen, whose predictably cutting, caustic and cynical wit, however, masked a deep and abiding empathy.

The narrative proper begins with Violet Paget (Vernon Lee (1856–1935)), who, with her partner and muse Clementina (Kit) Anstruther-Thomson, engaged in introspective personal journaling to detect and report the physiological effects of art and beauty on the human organism. Paget’s research crosses paths with that of Munich psychologist Theodor Lipps (1851–1914). Lanzoni reports that Lee and Lipps may have met in person in Rome at the Fifth International Congress of Psychology in 1905 (where both were on the program).

At the risk of over-simplification, Paget, Lipps, and Karl Groos (1861–1946) form a triumvirate of empathy innovators, who turn to motor mimicry, inner imitation, sympathetic muscular memory, and aspects of physiological resonance to account for the stimulating effects of artistic and natural beauty on human experience. Their analysis is the flip side of the implicit panpsychism, personification, anthropomorphism by which beautiful nature is animated with human expressions of the emotional life – for example, angrystorms in the ocean, melancholymists in the valley, a joyfulsunrise, a fearfuldarkness.

This remarkable feature of human experience: that we attribute emotions (and even intentions) to natural objects – angry storms, cheerful sunsets, and melancholy clouds. Magical, primitive thinking? An adaptive reflex? This review does not require that anyone, including Lanzoni, have solved this problem. However, some contemporary thinkers have speculated that it is a cognitive design defect of human nature to attribute intentionality (including emotional propositional contents) to otherness – whether human or physical – as an adaptive mechanism arising in the context of biological evolution.

Theodor Lipps is the one who puts Einfühlung on the map between 1883 and 1914 (his death), and those who are contemporaries must explain how they differ from his position.

Lipps’ position on empathy was already multidimensional, extending Einfühlung from the projection of feelings into objects to the perception of other people’s expressions of animate life. Lanzoni’s reading of Lipps is much more charitable than mine, and I find Lipps at loose ends and philosophically naïve as he tries to account for the first person’s access to the experiences of the second person by “an original innate association between the visual image and the kinesthetic image (1903: 116). Lipps thinks he has demolished the philosopher’s problem of other minds but unwittingly recreates it in his own terms (e.g., Agosta 2014: 62 – 63).

Lanzoni notes Sigmund Freud’s (1856–1939) debt to Lipps based on transference as a kind of projection. For Lipps, psychological processes were performed, with few exceptions, beneath the threshold of consciousness, which is another factor that made Lipps’ positions attractive to Freud.

Any thinker or author who used the term “Einfühlung” would inevitably also conjure up the image of Theodor Lipps, which limited the thinkers ability to use it without extensive argument or the risk of being mistaken as a follower of Lipps. This point is key: in his own time Lipps had in itself branded himself as the “go to guy” for all matters empathic. More on the significance of this dilemma below.)

By the way, Lanzoni does not italicize the word “Einfühlung” unless it is used in a specifically German context. “Einfühlung” is now an English word!

Johann Herder (1744–1803) also gets honorable mention at this point (p. 32) as a philosopher in the Romantic tradition. Herder is noteworthy as a proponent of empathy as a verb – sichhereinfühlen– to feel one’s way into. Herder was a fellow traveler of Goethe and actually “on staff” as the chief Lutheran prelate at Weimar, innovating in the historical development of language in a proto-evolutionary (and metaphysical) context. This points to an entire undeveloped paradigm of empathy not developed by Lanzoni. For example, for Herder empathy was required to feel one’s way into the world of Homer in order to produce an accurate translation of Homer’s Iliad.

This paradigm of empathy as translation is arguably at the same level of generality as empathy as projection, but remained undeveloped until the rise of hermeneutics along a separate trajectory. And since Lanzoni seemingly unquestioningly accepts Rudolf Makkreel’s dismissal of the relevance of Einfühlung for Wilhelm Dilthey (granted he has little use for the word), this approach is not further explored.

Yet the modern innovators of interpersonal empathy such as Carl Rogers (1902–1987) might be read as leap-frogging back to the original sense of entering the other’s world in order to translate it into the first person, subject’s own terms. Such Herderlike usages also fits well with what Gordon Allport (1897–1967) and Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) were doing in arraying empathy against racism and prejudice in expanding the boundaries of community by empathically translating between them (see Chapter Nine).

An entire possible alternate history of empathy, as yet unwritten, opens up at this point – empathy as translation between subjects. (Granted that Rogers probably never heard of Herder, at least not in the context of empathy, so this is a conceptual nuance; but Rogers probably never heard of Lipps either.)

As is by now well known, in part thanks to Lanzoni’s work, the word “empathy” itself comes into English thanks to Edward Bradford Titchener, the founder of a Wundtian style psychology lab at Cornell University (and translator of Wundt). However, what is less well known is the back-and-forth about the meaning of Einfühlung as explored in detail by Lanzoni.

I was impressed by the work of James Mark Baldwin (1861–1934), who contribution to empathy as semblance was interrupted and obscured as he had to leave town in a hurry – apparently for Paris – after being arrested in a raid on a Baltimore house of prostitution. Baldwin was innovating with empathy in terms of semblance – the “as if” of child’s play and the play of the artist.

Lanzoni quotes in detail the devaluing remarks about “empathy” made by James and Alix Strachey, the translators of Freud, who call it a “vile word” (p. 67). Though Freud used variations of “Einfühlung” some 22 times in 24 volumes, the word is often paraphrased or mistranslated by the Stracheys, using synonyms such as “sympathetic understanding.”

It is amazing how much empathy or lack thereof turns on a mistranslation. My take on it? Basically Freud did not use the word Einfühlung more often because he was not someone who could abide being a footnote to Lipps (who, as noted, virtually owned the distinction Einfühlungin German). There are other technical reasons Freud chose not to comment more extensively on empathy, including his dismissal of the philosophical uses of introspection as a function of the conscience (superego), whereas introspection and empathy are “joined at the hip” in a therapeutic context (see also Agosta 2014: 66 – 82).

I hasten to add that Freud did say in his “Recommendations for Physicians Beginning Psychoanalytic Treatment” (1913) that if the would-be analysts start in any other way than with empathy, they are headed for trouble. But once again the reader has no idea of Freud’s true position, because “empathy” is mistranslated as “sympathetic understanding.” However, these observations are less critical to Lanzoni’s point, which is otherwise unexceptionally on target.

Meanwhile, Titchener has numerous ideas (that we would today consider highly unconventional) about how images accompany word meanings, but his translation of “Einfühlung” as “empathy” sticks. In an otherwise comprehensive engagement (Lanzoni really does seem to have read everything!), she does not mention how empathy subsequently becomes embroiled in the disappearance of introspection controversy (behaviorists regard it as illusory) and ultimately is “taken down” by the behaviorists in their attack on all things relating to subjective consciousness and inwardness. However, all this lies ahead in the B.F. Skinnerian 1950s through 1980s, and the Chapter ends with Einfühlung being an intertwining of projection, aesthetic appreciation, and Baldwin’s “semblance.”

But how does one get from a empathy that projects human emotions and mindedness onto objects in art and nature and an empathy as human understanding of another, second person who contains an emotional life and mind of his or her own distinct from that of the first person?

Lanzoni skillfully navigates the challenge of engaging how the projective aesthetic empathy of Lipps et al get transformed, translated, and reconciled, with the interpersonal receptive empathy of talk therapy and personal counseling.

One missing link comes in modern dance. The missing link is identified as to “live in the mind of the artist who designed it [the object]” (p. 97). At this moment in the text, the intentionality of the artist looms large. In effect, the regression (my word, not Lanzoni’s word) is back from the intentionality built into the artistic artifact or performance towards human subjectivity. Now intentionality is available to build a bridge between a projective empathy of the object and a receptive intersubjective empathy of the human subject.

Both projective empathy and receptive empathy are ways (admittedly divergent) of dealing with and transforming otherness– the otherness of the object and the otherness of the human subject. This is why aesthetic empathy and interpersonal empathy belong to the same concept and are not merely the same homonymous word for different underlying concepts.

Another missing link occurs in “Personality as Art.” Lanzoni gathers together the contributions of Herbert Langfeld (1879–1958), Wilhelm Worringer (1881–1965), Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), who expand the boundaries of aesthetic, projective empathy in the direction of the understanding of human beings. The study of the artistic self-expressions of psychotics incarcerated in mental asylums also deserves mention here as opening up the exchange between aesthetic projective empathy and interpersonal receptive empathy.

Nowhere does any one (including Lanzoni) say, “Relate to the human being with the respect and interpretive finesse with which one relates to a work of art,” but that is the basic subtext here. In our own time, the late Richard Wollheim, a notorious free spirit, sometimes took such a position about art and its objects.

The engagement with empathy as human understanding picks up speed. Whenever a breakdown occurs the possibility of a breakthrough also arises. Such is the case with schizophrenia. In apparently separate but overlapping and near simultaneous innovations, E. E. Southard (1876–1920), Roy G. Hoskins , Louis Stack Sullivan (1892–1949), Karl Jaspers (1883–1969), and C. G. Jung identified schizophrenia as a challenge to or a disorder of empathy. In short, it is hard to empathize – Jaspers maintained it was impossible – with people who were disordered in such a way that they displayed the cluster of symptoms we now group as schizophrenia including perceptual distortions, incoherent speech patterns, disordered thinking, lack of reality testing, bizarre ideas, emotional flatness, intermittent acute anxiety or paranoia, lack of motivation, lack of responsiveness, burn out, and (occasionally) lack of personal hygiene.

Southard designed an “empathic index” (p. 101) guiding the psychiatrist through a series of questions such as: How far can you read or feel yourself into the patient? Thus the first, admittedly over-simplified, version of the schizophrenia test: Can you imagine experiencing what the patient reports he or she is experiencing? If not, then that counts as evidence they are on the equivalent of what we would today call the “schizophrenic spectrum.”

We finally arrive at our present day folk definition of empathy: the ability to step into and walk in another person’s shoes and then to step back into one’s own shoes again, and, in so doing, to “feel along with, to understand, and to insinuate one’s self into the feelings of another person” (p. 124).

Lanzoni asserts: “[T]he psycho-therapeutic rendering of empathy traded self-projection for its opposite: one now had to bracket the self’s findings and judgments in order to more fully occupy the position of another” (p. 125). Thus, a coincidence of opposites in which the two extremes are perhaps counter-intuitively closer to one another than either point is to the middle.

With Chapter Five on “Empathy in Social Work and Psychotherapy,” Lanzoni makes yet another decisive contribution to empathy scholarship.

Carl Rogers famously puts empathy on the map in the 1950s, 60s, and beyond, as the foundation for psychotherapeutic action. Though it is an oversimplification, in client-centered Rogerian therapy, one gives the client a good listening – one gives the client empathy – and the client gets better.

Lanzoni connects the empathy dots. They lead back into the empathy archives. They lead back from Carl Rogers to D. Elizabeth Davis, a student of Jessie Taft (1892 – 1960), a nurse and social worker, who, in turn, was strongly influenced in her conception of relational therapy by G. H. Mead’s (1863–1931) social behaviorism and Otto Rank (1884–1939). Rank belonged to Freud’s inner circle along with Ernest Jones (1879–1958), Karl Abraham (1877–1925), and Sándor Ferenczi (1873–1933).

Not a medical man or even a scientist, Otto Rank met Freud in 1905 when he presented Freud with his innovative work on the artist as inspired by Freud’s theories. Something clicked between them. In 1905 Freud was less isolated, but still hungry for recognition and fellow travelers. Think: father son transference.

Rank eventually completed a PhD dissertation at the University of Vienna on literature (the Lohingrin Saga), in part thanks to the financial generosity of Freud. Freud paid him to be the recording secretary of the Psychoanalytic Association. The literary dimension is of the essence, and, in our own time, we have a renewed appreciation that studying literary fiction expands one’s empathy. This too strengthens the case for the overlap of the aesthetic and interpersonal dimensions of empathy.

As was often the case with Freud and his “sons” – Jung, Ferenczi, Adler – the seemingly inevitable “falling out” between Rank and the Freudian establishment was especially bitter. Ultimately Louis Stack Sullivan made the parliamentary motion to expel Rank from the American Psychoanalytic Association. With friends like these … Rank formed his own separate Association and continued to innovate and earn Greenbacks.

Carl Rogers learns of Rank’s work through one of his colleagues, who is being analyzed by Rank, now residing in the States. Rogers invites Rank to speak at a three-day seminar (circa 1936), lecturing to forty-five social workers and educators. Rogers later notes that it was in this context “that I first got the notion of responding almost entirely to the feeling being expressed” (p. 144). Voila! Mark the historical moment: Client-centered therapy is conceived.

Mine is a bare bones outline of how Lanzoni connects the dots. The dynamics and the personalities, which Lanzoni richly narrates, make for fascinating story telling in themselves. Fast forward to the 1930s as Jessie Taft, a nurse and social worker separately innovating in empathic relatedness, is translating Rank’s Will Therapyfrom the German. There is still research to be done to follow the threads into Rank’s work, whose literary skills in mining myth and fiction are used in elaborating an approach to the emotions that transgresses the relatively narrow definition of Freudian libido (desire).

Though Lanzoni does not get so far, I do not believe that Rank had the specific distinction of Einfühlung, but worked with the communication and understanding of the emotions in such a way as to produce psychological transformation. Rank uses the word “love” in the way of an empathy-like “unconditional positive regard.”

By the time Rogers is fully engaged with Einfühlung, “empathy” does notmean agreement with the other or mere mirroring. The therapy client may usefully be self-expressed about the emotions with which he or she is struggling. These emotions, in turn, are thereby brought to the surface, acknowledged, worked through, and able to be transformed. The therapist helps the client to metabolize the emotional congestion and gives back to the client the client’s own experience in a form that the client recognizes, hypothetically opening up a reorganization of psychic structure.

Lanzoni also gives a “shout out” to Heinz Kohut, MD (1913–1981), but just barely. Kohut was the innovator who puts empathy on the map in psychoanalysis (then the dominant paradigm in psychiatry) starting in 1959 with his celebrated article “Introspection, empathy, and Psychoanalysis.”

Kohut was very circumspect about his sources relating to empathy and regarding those who inspired him in his work on empathy. Chronically under-appreciated (and sometimes even under attack) by the prevailing orthodoxy of Freudian ego psychology, Kohut’s footnotes about empathy as such are few and far between. Surely knowing the fate of Adler, Jung, Ferenczi, and Rank, not even to mention Jeffrey Masson, Kohut pushed back against the unfriendly accusation that Kohut’s emerging Self Psychology was distinct from Freudian psychoanalysis, even as Self Psychology seemed increasingly to be so.

It is likely Kohut was influenced by Sándor Ferenczi and Michael Balint (Lunbeck 2011). Speaking personally, I have never seen a shred of evidence that Kohut read Rank, who was by that time devalued as yet another notorious “bad boy” and psychoanalytic heretic. Of course, that does not mean that Kohut did not do so – and it is also possible that I just need to get out more. Kohut and Rogers seemed to have inhabited parallel but wholly distinct universes.

My take? And not necessarily Lanzoni’s: Kohut was sui generis– and wherever he first got the word “empathy” itself (Kohut, though a Austrian, German-speaking refugee, was by 1959 writing in English), his definition of empathy as “vicarious introspection” is a wholly original contribution.

One problem is that as soon as one engages Kohut’s The Analysis of the Self(1971), arguably a work of incomparable genius, discovering as it does new forms of transference, relations to the other, and possibilities for humanization, the reader is hit by a tidal wave of terms such as “cathexis,” “archaic object,” and “repressed infantile libidinal urges.” These make the reading a hard slog for most civilians.

The force of historical empathy is strong with Lanzoni as she engages “Popular Empathy.” She describes how in the post World War II world “empathy” breaks out of its narrow academic context into the American cultural milieu at large.

For example, the then-popular radio (and eventually TV) personality Arthur Godfrey was featured on the February 1950 cover of Time magazine, asserting “He has empathy” (p. 208). The notorious quiz show scandals of the late 1950s were apparently a function of mis-guided empathy, giving contestants answers to build audience empathy for the contestants. Advertisers “got it”: help the audience empathize with the brand and the person using the brand – give the customer empathy, they buy the product. Even if it was never quite so simple, the Boston Globe(July 3, 1964) quotes the Harvard Business Review: Empathy is “the ability feel as the other fellow feels – without becoming sympathetic” (p. 210).

Meanwhile, Carl Rogers has an existential encounter with Martin Buber (celebrated author of I and Thou) at the University of Michigan (1956). Rogers is profiled in Timemagazine in 1957 as practicing a psychotherapy that uses empathy in contrast with the then-prevailing paradigm of psychoanalysis, which uses – what? Insert the caricature of an authoritarian analysis of the Oedipus complex.

In an eye-opening Chapter on “Empathy, Race, and Politics,” Lanzoni documents the role of empathy in the movement for civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s in America. Both Kenneth B. Clark and Gordon Allport provided examples of (social) psychologists who were committed to social justice. They were committed to overcoming the one dimensional, trivial and convenient issues of academic research (still ongoing) instead engaging with urgent social realities such as prejudice, racism, poverty, and inequality.

According to Lanzoni, Allport drew on the tradition of Einfühlung to describe empathy as a means of grasping the human personality holistically, thus breaking down the barrier between aesthetic and interpersonal empathy. Clark used empathy as the basis for arguing for equality under the law: “to see in one man all men; and in all men the self” (p. 217). Sounds like empathy to me.

In 1944 Allport taught an eight-hour course to Boston police officers to tune down racial tensions. Allport encountered and faced what he called an “abusive torrent of released hostility.” In response Allport deployed the technique of nondirective or “unemotional listening,” learned from Carl Rogers. Once again, sounds like empathy. By the end of the session, the officers reportedly became bored by their own complaints. One who had “at first railed against the Jews tried in later remarks to make amends.” But empathy remained a two-edged sword, capable of eliciting searing anger when others thought they had not been given the dignity they deserved as well as dialing down narcissistic rage once it had been called forth (pp. 220 – 221).

Clark was so impressed by psychoanalyst Alfred Adler’s (1870–1937) power dynamics in the context of society that he shifted his major from neurophysiology to psychology. In 1946, Clark and his wife, Mamie Clark (PhD, Columbia) established the Northside treatment Center in Harlem to expand education, counseling, and psychological service for youth in Harlem.

In July 1953 Clark wrote to Allport, asking help in preparing a document for the upcoming Supreme Court deliberations on desegregation in the Brown v. Board of Education case. Allport responded quickly. The rest, as they say, is history.

Gunnar Myrdal (author of the celebrated American Dilemma, demonstrating that the history of the US isthe history of race relations (1944)) said of Clark’s work, especially Dark Ghetto(1965): a demand for “human empathy and even compassion of the part of as many as possible of those who can read, think, and feel in free prosperous white America” (p. 241). Just so.

Instead of becoming ever more cynical and resigned in the face of prejudice that seemed baked into the neo-liberal, market-oriented vision of American society, Clark calls forth empathy. Clark’s calls for empathy became more insistent. What happens when Clark and empathy speak truth to power? Empathic reason? Rational empathy? One can only wish that Clark had lived to see the people of this great country elect Barak Obama as President of these United States. We do not know if this was an anomalous moment, a beacon in the current fog of fake everything, or a kind of liberal purgatory – one step forward, one step backward – to call forth further struggle. From the perspective of Q2 2019 as I write this review, such events seem like a dream. Breakdowns are hard but inevitably point the way to the next breakthrough.

Lanzoni demonstrates that society’s interest in empathy had continuously been at the level of at least a steady simmer in the popular and social justice communities in the 1950s through 1970s even as professional psychology was lost and wandering through the wasteland of Skinnerian behaviorism.

That which really brings the conversation about empathy to a rolling boil in the final chapter is the discovery of mirror neurons in the macaque monkeys by the group of brain scientists in Parma, Italy including V. Gallese,, L. Gadiga, L. Gogassi, and G. Rizzolatti.

Mirror neurons are neurons are activated both when a subject takes an action and similarly when the subject watches another subject doing the same thing. For example, the set of neurons in the premotor cortex of the monkey is activated when it drinks from a cup. Okay, fine. The astonishing finding is that these same neurons are activated when the monkey watches another monkey (or any one) drink from the cup. Could this be the underlying basis of the motor mimicry, inner imitation, felt resonance, with which thinkers such as Violet Paget, Theodor Lipps, and Karl Groos remarked? Could this be the neural infrastructure for Kohut’s vicarious engaged, or Roger’s felt sense of participating in the other’s experience? The infrastructure for Mark Davis or Alvin Goldman on perspective taking and simulation?

The battle is joined.

Lanzoni covers the explosion of theories, studies, and amazing results that have occurred since the identification of alleged mirror neurons. Bottom up, affective empathy is combined with top down, cognitive empathy to complete the picture of empathic relatedness.

The author of Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman, weighs in with a follow up on Social Intelligence– that is, empathy. Victorio Gallese’s shared manifold hypothesis makes the case for a multi-person virtual manifold of experience that can be vicariously sensed by each partner in empathic resonance. Jean Decety’s seminal architectural definition of empathy paves the way for social neuroscience and functional magnetic imaging research (fMRI) that visualizes other people’s pain. Marco Iacoboni Mirroring Peopleargues that we have no need to use inference to understand other people. We use mirror neurons. Disorders of empathy are identified: Simon Baron-Cohen’s breakthrough work on Mindblindness(1995) identifies possible interventions for autism spectrum disorders.

On a less positive note, the colonization by neural science of the humanities and social sciences has proceeded apace with neuroaesthetics, neurolaw, neurohistory, neurophilosophy, neuropsychoanalysis, neurozoology,and so on, drawing provocative but, in many cases, highly questionable conclusions from what areas of people’s brains “light up” as they lay back in the fMRI apparatus and are shown diverse pictures or videos of people’s fingers being painfully impacted by blunt force.

Lanzoni reports on the neuro-hype that accompanies the discovery of mirror neurons in monkeys: “Cells That Read Minds.” Hmmm. The backlash is predictable if not inevitable. Greg Hickok’s The Myth of Mirror Neuronsraises disturbing questions about voodoo correlations in fMRI research. Other than a single report from 2010 of human mirror neurons allegedly identified in epileptic patients undergoing surgery, there is no evidence of the existence of human mirror neurons.

Lanzoni is an equal opportunity debunker: The fMRI research, while engaging and provocative, provides evidence of diverse brain functions that include thousands of neurons, not individual ones, whose blood oxygenation level data (BOLD) is captured by the fMRI. Correlation is not causation. The brain lights up! Believe me, if I doesn’t you are in trouble.

Still, the neuro-everything trend has traction (and its merits). Even if human mirror neurons do not exist, it is highly probable that some neurological system is available that enables us humans – and perhaps us mammals – to resonate together at the level of the animate expressions of life.

If there is a myth, it is that we are unrelated. On the contrary, we humans are all related – biologically, socially, personally. You know that coworker or boss you can’t stand? You are related. You know that politician you regard with contempt? You are related. You know that in-law or neighbor who gets your goat? You are related – intimately related, because we all share the same cognitive, affective, and neural mechanisms – and defects – designed in from when we were that band of hominids fighting off large predators and hostile neighbors in the environment of evolutionary origin.

Since this is not a softball review, as noted, I call out the limitations and incompletenesses of Lanzoni’s impressive contribution. One of the challenges is that the history of the concept empathy is not limited to the word “empathy” or Einfühlung. Indeed prior to Lanzoni’s work, some entirely reasonable individuals had concluded that Lipps projective empathy and Roger’s interpersonal empathy were entirely distinct concepts. We now know that they belong together in a kind of coincidences of opposites because empathic animation of the work of art or beautiful nature and empathic receptivity to other human beings are related, but diverse, ways of engaging with otherness.

First incompleteness: Prior to Titchener’s invention of the word “empathy” as a translation of the German “Einfühlung” the main word in English was “sympathy.” Now it is a common place today to say that “sympathy” means a reactive emotion such as pity in contrast with “empathy” that captures a vicarious experience of the other’s experience or takes a sample or trace affect of the other’s experience. And that remains true today. David Hume (1711–1776) and Adam Smith (1723–1790) get barely a shout out.

However, if one goes back as recently as David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature(1731) one can find at least four different senses of sympathy – emotional contagion, the power of suggestion, a vicarious experience such as one has in the theatre, the conjoining of an idea and impression of another’s expression of emotion with the idea of the other [which starts sounding like our notion of interpersonal empathy].

In addition, if one looks at Hume’s aesthetic writings, one finds the distinction of a delicacy of sympathy and of taste. If your delicacy of sympathy and taste is more refined than mine, then you may experience a fine-grained impression that is more granular than mine. For example, you perceive sadness behind a person’s outburst of temper whereas I only perceive the obvious anger. Your delicacy of sympathy and taste is superior to mine. In our own modern language, you empathy is more discriminating.

A second incompleteness is in the treatment of the phenomenologist’s – Edith Stein (1891–1942), Max Scheler (1874–1928), Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), Maurice Merleu-Ponty (1908–1961), who receive honorable mention in a cursory nod to their diverse engagements with Einfühlung. For example, in a footnote, Scheler’s eight distinctions of sympathy and empathy are called out in a footnote (p. 360n40): Miteinanderfühlung[reciprocal feeling], Gefühlsansteckung[infectious feeling], Einsfühlung[feeling at one], Nachfühlung[vicarious feeling], Mitgefühl[compassion], Menschenliebe[love of mankind], akosmischtishe Person- und Gottesliebe[acosmic love of persons and God], und Einfühlung[empathy]. Well and good.

Leaving aside purely practical considerations of editorial constraints on word count and that the phenomenological material may have been covered elsewhere [e.g., see Agosta 2014, especially Chapters 4 – 6]: the reason that the additional phenomenological chapter was not provided is a breakdown in an otherwise astute historical empathy.

In particular, today hardly anyone has heard of Theodor Lipps (granted that Lanzoni’s work is changing that). However, in his own day Lipps was famous – celebrated as the proponent of a theory of Einfühlungthat provided the substructure for aesthetics and grasping the expressions of animate life of other people. It was as if Lipps was an Antonio Salieri to would-be Mozarts such as Freud or Husserl (once again, except for the play (and movie) Amadeus). Using modern terms, it was as if in his own day Lipps was branded in the marketing sense as “the empathy guy.”

Between roughly 1886 and 1914 (the date of Lipps’ death) no philosopher, psychologist, or psychoanalyst could use the word “Einfühlung” without being regarded as a follower – or at least a fellow traveller – of Lipps.

In the case of the phenomenologist, the result is a sustained attack on Lipps. Edith Stein quotes Max Scheler against Lipps’ theory of “projective empathy.” Her contribution becomes a candidate deep structure of Husserl’s 5thCartesian Meditation. Husserl attempts to overcome the accusation of solipsism [there is nothing in the universe except my own consciousness] without using empathy as a mere psychological mechanism. Yet Husserl dismisses empathy, using a Kantian idiom, and “kicks it upstairs”: “The theory of experiencing someone else, the theory of so-called ‘empathy,’ belongs in the first story above our ‘transcendental aesthetics’ ” (1929/31: 146[173]). “Transcendental aesthetics” is a form of receptivity – such as receptivity to another subject. But then Husserl has to reinvent empathy in other terms calling it “pairing” and “analogical apperception.”

One thing is certain: in Husserl’s Nachlass(posthumous writings) he makes extensive use of Einfühlungin building an account of intersubjectivity. Empathy is the window into the sphere of ownness of the other individual subject. Empathy is what gives us access to the Other, with a capital “O.” Empathy enacts a “communalization” with the other. Key term: communalization (Vergemeinschaftung).

In his published writings Husserl was exceedingly circumspect in his use of the term “Einfühlung,” virtually abandoning it between Ideas(1913) and the Cartesian Meditations(1929/31). But in Husserl’s work behind the scenes empathy was moving from the periphery to the center of his account of intersubjectivity. The Nachlassvolumes corresponding the Cartesian Meditations contain hundreds of references to Einfühlung, in which it is doing the work of forming a community of subjects. The anxiety of influence? The influence of Lipps? Quite likely.

I would not blame anyone – including Lanzoni – for not wanting to try to disentangle this complex of distinctions and influences of empathy in the context of phenomenology. It is not for the faint of heart.

As of this date (Q2 2019), Lipps is not translated from the German so far as I know. There is a reason for that – Lipps falls through the crack between Immanuel Kant and Wilhelm Wundt. If ever there were someone of historical interest, it is Lipps.

Lipps provides an elaborate rewrite of rational psychology using a quasi-Kantian idiom without any of the empirical aspects of Wundt. Still, Lipps enjoyed considerable celebrity in his own time. So far as I know, no one has commented on the fact that Lipps in effect substitutes the term “Einfühlung” for “taste” in his aesthetics. Those wishing to engage further may usefully see Agosta 2014: “From a Rumor of Empathy to a Scandal of Empathy in Lipps in A Rumor of Empathy: Rewriting Empathy in the Context of Philosophy: pp. 53 – 65: DOI: 10.1057/978113746534.0007.)

A third incompleteness is the role of empathy in psychoanalysis proper, which was perhaps a wilderness too desolate to reward proper scholarly engagement. Lanzoni notes: “There were also handful of psychoanalysts, trained, not surprisingly, in Vienna, who ventured to explain empathy to a popular audience. Analyst and writer Theodor Reik published Listening with the Third Ear in 1948 [….] Empathy worked like wireless telegraphy to allow one to tune in to the inchoate messages of another’s unconscious” (p. 208). Empathy as receptivity andbroadcast of messages. However, Reik was not a medical doctor, and the American Psychoanalytic Association declined to validate his credentials, leaving him as yet another voice crying in the wilderness.

Lanzoni gives Kohut another “shout out,” noting that empathy was an observational act that led the analyst to a scientific appraisal of the other person rather than one of the “sentimentalizing perversions of psychotherapy” (p. 207). Of course, Kohut moved steadily in the direction of asserting that empathy itself could be curative, though, in contrast to Rogers, mainly in a process of optimal breakdown, being ruptured and restored. Empathy breaks down, the attuned therapist acknowledges and cleans up the misunderstanding, empathy is restored, psychic (personality) structure is shifted and strengthened – thenthe patient gets better.

A fourth incompleteness is the missing paradigm of empathy as translation between different individuals and the worlds in which the individuals inhabit. Once again, this is not a criticism of Lanzoni, but simply to note that, substantial though Lanzoni’s contribution is, there is more work still to be done.

Herder was working on a complex interpretive problem of empathy, creating an entire world in all its contingencies and details in order adequately to translate a text from attic Greek into German or understand a work of art in its ancient context. Herder’s project envisions no trivial translation, and, if anything, is an application of empathy broader and bolder than what is being proposed here or in any reconstruction of Kant. According to Herder, in order to deliver an adequate translation, the translator must think and feel himself into – empathize into [sichhineinfühlen] – the world of the author or historical figure. The translator is transformed into a Hebrew, e.g., Moses, among Hebrews, a poet among bards, in order to “feel with” and “feel around” the world of the text (e.g., Herder as cited in Sauder 2009: 319):

Feeling is the first, the most profound, and almost the only sense of mankind; the source of most of our concepts and sensations; the true, and the first, organ of the soul for gathering representations from outside it . . . . The soul feels itself into the world [sichhineinfühlen] (1768/69: VIII: 104 (Studien und Entwürfe zur Plastik)) (cited in Morton 2006: 147-148).

Thinking from the point of view of everyone else is not to be confused with empathy in the Romantic idea of empathy where empathy is a truncated caricature of itself and summarily dismissed as merger, projection, or mystical pan-psychism. Nor is it clear that Herder, always the sophisticated student of hermeneutics, ever envisioned such a caricature of empathy. In any case, empathy is not restricted to the limitations of a Romantic misunderstanding of empathy as merger. Empathy as creating a context within which a translation – an empathic response – can occur stands on its own as an undeveloped paradigm (see also Agosta 2014: 36–37 (from which this text is quoted)).

Among the many strengths of Lanzoni’s book is her engagement with the many women researchers and scholars who contributed to the history of empathy: Violet Paget (Vernon Lee), who was there are the beginning with the physiological, mirroring effect of empathy in inner imitation; Edith Stein, research assistant (along with Martin Heidegger) to Edmund Husserl and her dissertation The Problem of Empathy(1917), which was influenced by and, in turn, informed Husserl’s ambivalence about making Einfühlungthe foundation of intersubjectivity (community); Jessie Taft, who developed an entire model of psychotherapy, relational therapy, combining element of G. H. Mead’s social behaviorism and Otto Rank’s psychoanalytically informed approach to the emotions, which, in turn, decisively influenced Carl Rogers. All this and more does Lanzoni truly deliver.

Lou Agosta. (2014). “From a Rumor of Empathy to a Scandal of Empathy in Lipps in A Rumor of Empathy: Rewriting Empathy in the Context of Philosophy: pp. 53 – 65: DOI: 10.1057/978113746534.0007.

____________. (2014). A Rumor of Empathy: Rewriting Empathy in the Context of Philosophy. New York: Palgrave Pivot.

Elizabeth Lunbeck. (2011). “Empathy as a Psychoanalytic Mode of Observation: Between Sentiment and Science,” in Histories of Scientific Observation, ed. Lorraine Daston and E. Lunbeck. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

The first empathy book reviewed here is very good indeed. William Miller’s Listening Well: The Art of Empathic Understanding (Wipf and Stock, 114pp, ($18US)) is a short book. Admirably concise. My short review is that, as I am author of three academic and one “how to” book(s) on empathy, this is the book that I wish I had written.

Listening Well contains the distilled wisdom of Miller’s several decades of practicing listening as the royal road to expanding empathy.Listening Wellis a “how to” book, but the author is adamant that such a skill lives and flourishes in the context of a commitment tobeing empathic. (I hasten to add that, though Miller’s is the book Iwish I had written, my own publications on empathy are significant contributions, and I shamelessly urge the reader to get them on the short list, too.)

Being with the other person without judgments, labels, categories, diagnoses, evaluations, and so on, is what empathy is about most authentically. It is not that such assessments do not occur. They do, but they almost always get in the way. Listening Well is way too short to be a textbook, but I can see it as being useful in a workshop, seminar, or as exercises in a class.

In case you are unaware of William Miller’s background, he is the innovator behind Motivational Interviewing. Listening well – the practice, not just the title of the book – is at the heart of this approach. In turn, the practice of listening well is based on empathic understanding. Miller is explicit in invoking the work of Carl Rogers (1902 – 1987) Rogers was one of the founders of humanistic psychology, and Rogers’s person-centered psychotherapy provides the foundation for this results-oriented intervention.

Cris Beam is a would-be “bad girl,” who has written a very good book. In a world of constrained, limited empathy, the empathic person is a non-conformist. Beam is one of those, too, and succeeds in sustaining a nuanced skepticism about the alternating hype and over-valuation of empathy over against those who summarily dismiss it. Most ambivalently, she calls out the corporate infatuation with empathy. I paraphrase the corporate approach: Take a walk in the other person’s shoes in order to sell them another pair.

In Beam’s book I Feel You: The Surprising Power of Extreme Empathy (Houghton Mifflin, 251 pp. ($26 US$)), Cris Beam makes empathy present. She brings forth empathy her engagement with difficult cases that challenge our empathy, including her own conflicts. In the process of struggling with, against, and for empathy, she succeeds in bringing forth empathy and making empathy present for the reader. From an empathic point of view, I can think of no higher praise.

It gets personal. Beam reports that she is a survivor of a floridly psychotic mother and a father who, at least temporarily (and probably to save himself), abandoned Cris to her fate with that woman. As a teenager, Beam escapes to her father and his second marriage only to be rejected when she “comes out” as a lesbian some years later. Fast forward to Beam’s own second marriage [both to women].

Beam’s partner announces that the partner (at that time a “she”) is committed to transitioning to becoming a man. Beam decides to support her (becoming him) and sticks with it through the top surgery, administering the testosterone shots. The partner tells Beam: “I will love you always [regardless of my gender].” Beam decides to believe the partner. (See what I mean? You can’t make this stuff up.)

Nor is this a softball review, and I decisively disagree with Beam when she says that empathy is “mutual vulnerability” and approvingly quotes André Keet: “there are no neat boundaries between victim, perpetrators, beneficiaries, and bystanders …” (p. 191). While such a statement is descriptively accurate, once the father walks, leaving the psychotic mother and child behind, the commitment of empathy is to respect boundaries and (re)establish them when the boundaries have broken down or been violated.

Empathy is all about boundaries, and Beam, like so many of us, has her share of struggles with them. No easy answers here. But one final thought as my personal response to Beam’s thought provoking and inspiring work on empathy. We may usefully consider the poet Robert Frost: “Good fences make good neighbors.” I add: There is a gate in the fence, and over the gate is written the word “Empathy.”

The third empathy book, The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Empathy (Routledge, 410pp, $245 US$), has a truly ugly hardcover price of $151 even after the Amazon discount as publishers continue to respond to economic pressures by

Cover Art: The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Empathy

squeezing the life out of traditional print books that one can hold in one’s hand. The recommendation? Have the library order a copy (the paperback is $54.95, a better price, but nothing to write home about).

I have read, reviewed, and sometimes struggled, not only with the tangled history of empathy from David Hume to mindreading to mirror neurons, but with all thirty-three articles as a would-be empathic contribution for those who come after me. In many cases, I resonated empathically with the article. Bringing a rigorous and critical empathy to the article based on my life and experiences, sometimes the article “clicked,” i.e., worked for me. In other cases, I had to activate “top down” empathy, trying to create a context for a conversation, in which all I can otherwise see is an effort to maximize the number of stipulations that can be made to dance on the head of a pin—the pin being “empathy” (seems like about two dozen).

In every case, I try to be charitable; but in some cases the “empathy meter” goes in the direction of “tough love.” In one or two cases, I acknowledge my empathy breaks down completely in the face of academic over-intellectualization—an obvious occupational hazard in philosophy, but one that needs to be firmly contained in an engagement with a critical and rigorous empathy—and I simply recommend hitting the delete button—or a rewrite from scratch.

A “Handbook” promises to be a comprehensive engagement with the issues. So it is with deep regret, that I call out the fundamental incompletenesses. Nothing on education. Philosophers are not educators? Socrates was not a teacher? Mary Gordon’s program The Roots of Empathy (also the name of her book) includes bringing a baby into the grammar school classroom. Too developmental? Too psychological? The Philosophical Baby (Gopnik et al 2009)?

Also missing is the alternative point of view. The neurohype around mirror neurons is well represented; but what about the alternative point of view that such an entity as a mirror neuron does not even exist in humans and that the neurological infrastructure has a different configuration.[1]

The evolutionary context of empathy is considered; but missed are the role of the human mother-child matrix in the development of affective empathy, the empathizing effect of female sexual selection on male aggression, and the development of perspective taking in group selection in empathy as a “cheater detection system” and “empathic cruelty.” Empathy and morals are well represented; but little about social justice, overcoming prejudice, building bridges between disparate individuals and communities, or the tough related issues.

I am just getting warmed up here. Other incompletenesses are more fundamental—methodological. Empathy is not just the object of the inquiry, but it also needs to be the subject of the inquiry. We get our humanity from the other individual—and the other’s artistic expressions and social contributions.

This is subtle; so let me give an example. Expand your empathy: go to the art museum. Deepen your empathy: attend the symphony. Broaden your empathy: study a foreign culture or indigenous community. Stretch your empathy: read literary fiction. The engagement with aesthetics expands, trains, and develops our empathy; likewise, with the engagement with the other person. How does that work? The contributors seem not to have considered the possibility.

Instead empathy is on the defensive in too many places in the Handbook under review. Empathy is not represented as something of value that needs no apology and is worthy—along with (say) compassion and motherhood—of active promotion and expansion as a benefit to the community. Strangely enough, the breakdowns, failures, and misfirings of empathy—emotional contagion, conformity, projection, and communications lost in translation—are mistaken for empathy itself as if empathy could not misfire or go astray.

Nevertheless, bright spots appear. As Shoemaker points out in his article, the solution to a so-called parochial empathy that is limited to the “in group” is empathy itself – expanded empathy. Expand the boundaries of the community to be inclusive of those previously excluded. No doubt, easier said than done, but that is not a limitation of empathy itself, but of our need for expanded training and practice of empathy.

The battle is joined. Dan Zahavi, an otherwise impeccable and astute phenomenologist, enters into apologetic worrying about the conundrum: Can we really ever appreciate, understand, empathize with another person’s experience without having had a similar experience [or words to that effect]? Zahavi makes good use of Max Scheler to show that we can. With the exception of Jenefer Robinson (on “Empathy in music”), what is not called out (or even hinted at) is that the encounter with the other person, art, music, and literature enhances and expands our empathy.

In a world of limited empathy, the empathic person is a nonconformist. I wish I could write this Handbook is overflowing with nonconformists. Happily there are some and they produce several excellent articles—Zahavi, Gallagher, Ickes, Denham, Debes, Hollan, and John (Eileen); but it is otherwise filled with over-intellectualization, stipulations, neurohype, inaccurate phenomenological descriptions (mostly by the neuro-philosophers, not the phenomenologists), and tortured conceptual distinctions lacking in empathy. Seven out of thirty-three is a modest harvest.

One expects a Handbook on empathy would make empathy present for the reader. In the long, dreary march through 397 pages, thirty-three articles, I thirsted for it. Eileen John comes closest to doing so, and she is able to marshal the resources of empathy in the context of literature to help her get over what is admittedly a high bar. The scandal of this Handbook is that amid so many conceptual distinctions relating to empathy, empathy itself—empathy as a presence in the encounter with the reader—goes missing except in this one out of thirty-three articles.

What I am saying is that, with a few exceptions, largely concentrated in the contributions of Heidi Maibom and issues with her editing, there is nothing wrong with this Handbook; but there are so many things missing it is hard to know where to start with them. The practice of empathy is the source out of which emerge the ten thousand empathic distinctions in this Handbook. Key term: practice. Thinking and writing informed by the practice of empathy is the ultimate missing link.

Reviewing each of the thirty-three articles in the Handbook requires a book length treatment in itself. Therefore, I have provided one entitled A Critical Review of a Philosophy of Empathy (Two Pairs Press, 162pp. $10US (Amazon)), in which extensive background on the issues is also engaged. In short, this is a book about the book, and is the complete book review. Each of the articles is reviewed in detail with a seven separate and substantial sections orienting the reader to the issues, pro and con, engaged under core problems, history, understanding (mindreading), morals, aesthetics, and cultural issues, all relating to empathy. The recommendation? Check out the review, priced to cover printing plus a latte and biscotti for the reviewer, prior to engaging with the Handbook. You may get 80% of the value in the review; and you will not be bored.

[1]For example, see Gregory Hickok. (2014). The Myth of Mirror Neurons. New York: W. W. Norton. For further debunking of the neurohype see Decety et al. 2013, Vul et al. 2009, and Satel and Lilienfeld 2013.